This summer was hard on our family. Between the longest miscarriage ever, surprise ovarian surgery, solo parenting stints, and recovering from the house fire last spring - it felt like life just kept coming back for more blood. Getting ready to start our school year, and the first homeschooling year with two kids in for-realsies grades, I felt overwhelmed, burned out, and done. And I hadn't even started yet.
It was clear that something needed to change. I responded to that need in proper nerd fashion: looking into all the options - be they weird, fringe, or otherwise out of my norm. Catholic unschooling came across my rader, and for the first time I actually considered it's merits.
To be clear, we are not actually going all in on unschooling. We are still using the structure and curriculum choices through Mother of Divine Grace. However, it made since to re-assess how we went about implementing MODG using some of the things that can be learned from unschooling families.
Some ideas I came across I was not ok with accepting, but there were others that resonated with me.
Skill subjects vs. content subjects
While I knew the distinction of skill subjects and content subjects from my own experience as a homeschooled kid, I realized I wasn't acting the distinction that well in my practice of homeschooling my own children.
Some subjects work well most of the time with consistent daily practice that follows a logical sequence - these are the skill subjects. Math is an obvious one, but others like grammar, spelling, music theory, art, languages have at least parts of their study that are skill based.
Other subjects are about acquiring content knowledge. At least the early grades of science, history, some literature, art, geography are all content subjects. These are subjects that are perhaps best done with what I call guided exploration. Our studies for science, history, some geography, and lots of arts and literature, are being approached with less structured school time. Instead we grow and explore together a wide variety of topics in those subjects based one what the kids, or I, are interested in learning. That means lots of documentaries, field trips, experiments, library trips, and learning alongside my children.
When We School
In order to implement that unschooling exploratory style, an essential ingredient is needed - time. There has to be time for ideas to grow and percolate. Time for field trips. Time for talking and being with each other so that I, as their teacher and parent, can understand where their interest might be leading and how I can best facilitate their growth.
Which means we have shifted almost all of our book time to be after lunch, leaving the mornings open. This is the most likely time we have for getting out of the house, and finding the energy that exploratory learning involves. Since my oldest is just 2nd grade, this isn't too terribly difficult to do. Even when you consider additional reading practice, his work Monday through Thursday takes about two hours, max.
Shifting to afternoon lessons is important for another aspect of family functioning:
What to do with the active toddler
When we schooled mostly in the morning, the toddler was her worst self. She wasn't getting to play with her siblings as much, she was only happy drawing or doing other activities for about 20 minutes, and school was taking longer for the big kids due to the incessant interruptions.
So now we are mostly doing book work during her nap time.
The mornings with exploratory learning are much easier to include her in our learning. She gets lots of active time and loving on by everyone. That time of learning alongside each other, and investment into our family culture first, makes a huge different in everyone's attitude.
Book work goes much faster when I'm not cajoling anyone to "just get it done". Everyone from the quality time loving kids to my very touchy kids have had their love tanks filled.
But what about the book list?
This unschooling/homeschooling mashup is doable right now in large part because we were starting from a curriculum that emphasizes the parent/child connection and flexibility between kids. When you are starting from a place of guiding the child through the good, true, and beautiful, it is simple to take advantage of the multiple roads available for that journey.
We still use the reading list as our starting point, but end up reading far beyond it.
I still find the choices for math curriculum, handwriting, and other skill subjects to work for us.
But I needed to break up my mental idea that I was married to those choices.
So far I have had kids that have widely different places of struggle and ease when it comes to their learning. Embracing that sometimes what you need is fine tuning, instead of a wholesale do over, has been very freeing this year.
Are you changing things up this year? What have you done to make your days better when circumstances change?